Word: manhattans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...starts to be something more. In the end, by administering a series of steadily intensifying shocks of recognition, silence in the theater is almost complete?and there is something awed about it. We are not prepared for the earnestness, integrity and palpable truthfulness that is offered in Manhattan...
...always to him, then always in his shocked presence? His name is Isaac Davis, and he is directed by, played by and created by Woody Allen (with the assistance of his co-writer and friend, Marshall Brickman). Davis is the central character in Allen's new movie, Manhattan, and to put the matter simply, he is the mainspring of a masterpiece that is that perfect blending of style and substance, humor and humanity that his friends and followers were convinced he would one day make. It is also a rare summarizing statement, at once assured and vulnerable, in which...
...essence, what Woody Allen is saying in Manhattan is that our mental diets consist very largely of cultural junk food. We eat it up eagerly, because we are under the misapprehension that it is actually health food. The harm it does is hidden from us for years, like that of environmental carcinogens. We do not connect the workings of these intellectual pollutants with those strange buzzings in our brains?that erratically sounding, endlessly distracting static that prevents contemporary men and women from hearing one another's voices clearly, and therefore from making the connections they desperately need. The deftness with...
...have served as a necessary prelude. It is even possible to perceive some of its themes in Allen's work ever since he began making movies on his own in 1969 (Take the Money and Run was the first pure Woody). It could be argued that the difference between Manhattan and its predecessors is chiefly one of degree and control. But Allen has made so many changes that these differences now add up to nothing less than a transcendence...
More important, there is the enriching of his own character to consider in evaluating Manhattan. The basic Woody persona has always been a well-loved figure, a projection of the modern urban Everyman's privately held fantasies and terrors. Manhattan challenges that sense of instant identification, and makes clear just how much fictionalization Woody has practiced on himself...